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We're living in a time when it's hard not to know what to expect before you get to a restaurant. Find the website of a café you've heard about recently and you'll just as quickly find its menu, then be hurled onto its Instagram page, where you'll see photos of its most beautifully-positioned dishes posted by the legions who've made the pilgrimage (myself included).

Constant image-sharing means fewer surprises, and it also means that trends in design and in food (some of these, I fully admit to reveling in... whoops!) boil over as fast as hot milk—so fast that it's hard to know where they began in the first place. And that it's hard to remember a time before them.

And so scrolling through Instagram—if you follow the "in-the-know" in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Austin, London, Toronto...—is like looking through soft light-, marble surface-, creamy latte-, and drippy egg-colored glasses. You don't even need to check the account to know that there will be probably be succulents.

Places without this aesthetic (or that only operate in hours with little natural light—dive bars, I'm looking at you!) might not get as much attention, but I like to think that those remain the hidden treasures.

If there were a trendy restaurant filter on Instagram, here's what it would look like:

If Michelangelo were alive today, he'd be sculpting marble surfaces with exactly the right gray to white ratio for optimizing overhead shots:

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A (former) student of English, a lover of raisins, a user of comma splices. My spirit animal is an eggplant. I'm probably the person who picked all of the cookie dough out of the cookie dough ice cream. For that, I'm sorry.

I stopped taking pictures at my farmers market a couple of years ago. Why? I realized I was taking the same pictures that I had taken about twelve months prior. I've printed a few as greeting cards, but let's face it, a bunch of pattypan squash look the same year after year.

I don't dine out much these days. I really don't need to take pictures of restaurant food. At any given restaurant visit, there are generally several people taking photos of the food, better ones might be on Instagram, Flickr, worse photos on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp (unless the person is a serious photographer). Plus, many of the restaurants here (SF Bay Area) have a substantial social media presence, so it's not like I'm lacking for imagery.

I cook a lot at home, so I still take the occasional food photo. The one thing that I find lacking even today in 2016 is the small number of images showing the process of making the food. This site is an prime example, almost all of the photos are taken of the final product, whereas in many cases, one or two photos of key steps says far more than the fourth view of the same slice of cake.

A few times, I have take photos of my mise en place place on a sheet of butcher paper and scrawled basic notes like "10 g. kosher/1 kg. ___" or "325 deg 20 min." and that's my "recipe."

Aha! Here the person has used two skewers and wrapped part of them with foil to avoid charring the bamboo. Now if you've ever roasted shishitos like the previous photographer or made similar kabobs, well you'd know that the peppers tend to spin around on one skewer (and metal skewers are slippery anyhow). By using two bamboo skewers, you can prevent the peppers from spinning like a propellor.

This last photo is far more informational than the first shishito photo which only shows a dish of grilled peppers.

If you want a photo to tell a thousand words, you need to think about what photo to take.

A lot of people *still* don't get it. And it's not like the old days when you had to pay $8 for a 36-exposure roll of film and another $20 to have it developed and processed so there was a cost consideration. Today's photos are basically *FREE*, but a lot of food bloggers still don't know that there are other good and helpful food photos that aren't just a beauty shot of the final product.